Explore professional techniques for finalizing the front of a postcard design project, including text stylizing, bullet point insertion, color changes, line customization, and layer organization. Gain practical insights into harnessing the power of specific tools within a graphic design software to enhance your design outcome.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to replace hyphens with bullet points in a text, as well as adding extra spaces for better visual appeal. This highlights the importance of paying attention to the fine details in your design.
- It details the process of changing the color and font style of a text, as well as working with lines, including the customization of the line's appearance and style. This showcases the versatility of the design software's toolset.
- The guide emphasizes maintaining a clean and organized layers panel when working with different images and materials. This encourages efficient workflow and easier edits or changes in the future.
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In this video, we're going to be finishing up the front of our postcard. So let's begin first by working on the stylizing of this bottom text.
The first thing we're going to want to do is remove these hyphens and put in bullets instead. To do this, we can highlight the hyphen using Shift and the left arrow. Then, we're going to go up to Type, and going down below, we're going to go to Insert Special Character, and we're going to insert the symbol Bullet Character. Here, we can see that we now have the bullet.
Let's highlight this bullet and hit CTRL + C on the keyboard to copy, and let's highlight the hyphen and hit CTRL + V to paste. In addition, let's simply add one extra space before and after to give it a little more spacing. Finally, let's also change this last right font "Performance Oriented"—in this case, we want it to be green.
To do this, let's make sure first that we're editing the fill of our type rather than the fill of the text frame. From here, with the text highlighted, we'll simply click the green. Let's also make it Black Italic by going to our control bar and selecting Black Italic. If we hit V on the keyboard and hit W, we can see what this now looks like.
As one final change to the front here, let's work with our line. To do this, we can select the line. If you're having trouble selecting it, it may be because we're clicking on the guide. We can lock our guides by right-clicking and selecting Lock Guides.
Next, if we click, we can see that we now have our line selected. With our line, there are a couple of different options for how we want to customize it. Let's zoom in and take a closer look at it.
Going to our control bar, we have multiple options here for how we want our line to look. In addition, we can also open up our Properties or our Stroke. We can change the cap.
In addition, we can also change the type, make various different line styles, and for your postcard, feel free to change the line to whatever style you'd prefer. In this case, I kind of like the look of the wavy line. As I change the size or the weight, we'll see it changes the size of the waves. I'm going to leave mine at three points, and I'm going to Round Cap the end.
If I click outside and hit W on the keyboard and zoom out, I like the look of this. As one final change to the front of our postcard, let's go to our Layers panel, and we're just going to clean this up a little bit. Oftentimes, when I'm working with different images and different materials, I want to maintain a cleaner layer so that I know what I'm working with and can go back easily to make changes.
In order to do so, let's simply add another layer by going to the bottom to create a new layer. I'm going to select the background, hit W, select the background, and then holding Shift, I'm also going to select the logo, the line, and the text. I'm going to drag all of that onto Layer Two and retitle this "Base Layer" and hit ENTER. Finally, I'm going to move this below Layer One. This way, when I'm working with my images, they're all in this top layer, which I'll double-click and retitle "Images" and hit ENTER. While we can obviously make additional
Changes and rename different elements, I feel like this is helpful for us to just have a little more structure in the front of our postcard.
With all of these changes, we've now finished the front of our postcard. Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work, and in the next video, we'll be working on the back of our postcard. See you there!